This invention was conceived to solve a common problem experienced by travelers, namely, to have some means for identifying or locating their luggage in a baggage claim area of an airport, bus terminal or the like. Luggage is often confused with similar looking luggage or mistakenly removed from the baggage claim area and moved to another location. It is therefore typical in airports for travelers to have difficulty identifying or finding their luggage.
It is well known to use a miniaturized signal transmitter to activate a battery powered receiver for the purpose of locating a wide range of objects such as automobiles, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,278,556 to Oh, television remote controls, U.S. Pat. No. 5,598,143 to Wentz, U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,050 to Sacca, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,686,891 to Sacca, eyeglasses, U.S. Pat. No. 5,629,677 to Staino, Jr., and other items which are commonly misplaced, U.S. Pat. No. 5,677,673 to Kipnis. Radio frequency transmitters and receivers which emit both light and sound are also commonly used for purposes of locating lost objects, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 4,101,873 to Anderson, U.S. Pat. No. 4,476,469 to Lander, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,105 to Hedrick.
It is also known in the art to apply such radio transmitting technology to luggage. U.S. Pat. No. 5,126,719 to DeSorbo discloses a remotely armed suitcase alarm system. The system comprises a remote transmitter unit and a motion sensitive alarm which is attached to the suitcase and includes a signal receiver unit. U.S. Pat. No. 5,043,702 to Kuo discloses an alarm/security device integrated in the luggage which can be remotely activated to produce a siren and an electric shock. U.S. Pat. No. 5,576,692 to Tompkins discloses an airport luggage tracking system which utilizes a beeper paging device and requires a telephone call through a nationwide paging system to locate the luggage.
The prior art devices attempt to solve the same general problem of locating luggage by a signal-activated receiver or an alarm transmitter attached to the luggage. However, each has a problem in utilization which makes it relatively unattractive to manufacture or use. Some devices incorporate costly timer shutoff or battery power saver circuitry in an attempt to conserve power usage and prolong the use time between battery changes. To attract the user's attention, others require a loud alarm or distinctly audible type of sound, such as a loud continuous beeping, which may be annoying or disturbing to other people in the vicinity. Other devices employ complex triangulation locator circuitry in order to allow a person distant from the object to home in on the object. Still others employ cumbersome encoding circuitry and activation elements to initialize individual devices for a plurality of objects that might be lost.
Accordingly, it is a broad object of this invention to provide an improved locator device for identifying and locating an object which is inexpensive to produce and operates in a manner that allows the user to find the tagged object easily. In particular, it is desired that costly timer shutoff or battery power saver circuitry, loud annoying sounds, triangulation locator circuitry, or cumbersome encoding elements are avoided.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a small transmitting device activated by the push of a button which signals a receiving device attached to or incorporated into a piece of luggage to send out an easily identifiable audible and/or visible signal.